What is“Islamic”Art?
Revealing what is‘Islamic’in Islamic art, Wendy M. K. Shaw explores
the perception of arts, including painting, music, and geometry
through the discursive sphere of historical Islam including the
Qur’an, Hadith, Sufism, philosophy, and poetry. Emphasis on the
experience of reception over the context of production enables a new
approach, not only to Islam and its arts, but also as a decolonizing
model for global approaches to art history.
Shaw combines a concise introduction to Islamic intellectual
history with a critique of the modern, secular, and European
premises of disciplinary art history. Her meticulous interpretations
of intertextual themes span antique philosophies, core religious and
theological texts, and prominent prose and poetry in Arabic, Persian,
Turkish, and Urdu that circulated across regions of Islamic hegemony
from the eleventh century to the colonial and post-colonial contexts
of the modern Middle East.
Wendy M. K. Shaw is Professor of the Art History of Islamic Cultures
at the Free University Berlin. Her work explores the historiographic,
intellectual, institutional, and physical impact of modernity,
colonialism, and identity on the arts in regions of Islamic
hegemony, with a particular focus on the Ottoman Empire and
modern Turkey. She is the author ofPossessors and Possessed:
Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in the Late
Ottoman Empire (2003), and Ottoman Painting: Reflections of
Western Art from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic(2011).